Tournament Seeding 101

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#splatoon3 #bracketology #seeding

[RedOphiuchus]

I think seeding is a good thing in general but I think the TO made the right call to place you against your friend round 1 in a tournament against kids lmao

Makes it so no kid gets stomped out of the tournament round 1 and halves the amount of kids that gets stomped out throughout the tournament.

[TGCPhilip]

I can't believe no one has accepted his... beautiful artwork. Having dedicated so much time to art, I am truly uh.. disgusted by this reaction!

[residentfacehead]

Another advantage to the seeded format.
Having the best players/teams somewhat spread apart makes the tournement get more hype as it goes along.
Instead of "oh they beat their biggest rival, now its 4 easy sets till grands." The easier less interesting curbstomp battles take place early and by the end its two (usually) fairly matched teams with everything on the line.

[LuichoX]

im glad you didnt even mention splatoon in anything except the ending of this video so next time someone doesnt understand seeding on my local smash community i can link them to this lmao

[eseren]

I've had this happen a few times. We aren't the best by any means but we can hold our ground and it's frustrating being put up against the winner of the tournament first when we have won against teams who made it much further

[crazfamily]

I look at all of this as someone who wants to put the effort into splat 3 competitively. But then i look at my life and realize i am NEVER gonna be able to put the amount of time required because of what i have going on in life in general.
Anyone else can relate?

[benro]

I enjoy pools systems. at least at the tournaments I go to, Pools are randomly decided, and seeding only happens at later stages when only the better players are left. That way, the power gap between high and low seed is significantly lower.

[PickPig]

17:42 POV: the speed of sound has become 5x the speed of light

[luin]

love to see gem responding to fan demands (me and one other guy) for the shift away from Microsoft paint

edit:

[nmotschidontwannagivemyrea]

Something I didn't realize at first was that the numbers you were using were supposed to be a ranking of how good the teams are expected to be. It took me a bit to figure out why the arbitrary ordering of the numbers mattered

[Lerker]

This is also why double elim tournaments are the standard in most 1v1s haha.

[Chocomint_Queen]

As a former Magic the Gathering judge, I'm surprised that I only knew like... half of this? Like, I've seeded all of these types of tournaments, both manually and automatically, and I _thought_ I'd been taught why and how, but now I think, perhaps not as well as I could've been.

[Dwinner]

What's mathematically interesting is that a poorly sorted 8 player triple elim tournament would finish with the expected results for all players.

8 being 2^3, the exponent represents the amount of elims; double, triple, quadruple, etc. needed to negate poor bracket sorting.

[Cakeycakers]

How would you determine the rankings for seeding like who's the best and who's the worst if you don't have an answer for it, would round robins solve that?

[Stephen-Fox]

The thing I will always find amusing about American sports is that they insist on concluding seasons of their leagues with a single elimination tournament, despite leagues (usually) being a very complete round robin, often a double round robin, meaning that you'd get more accurate results for the season by just using ... But they want the _drama_ of a single elimination tournament.

...And then they go and seed the thing because they want to minimize the chance that the team that did best in the league of the top 4-8 will lose because that would be 'unfair.' If you want a fair result, just use the results of the bloody round robin you've been running for the past half year.

(Meanwhile, the English football pyramid, has two things going on, the league, where the results of it are left as is and the team that wins the league just wins the league and wins that trophy, and also a single elimination tournament with all the teams in the top 9 levels of the pyramid - I think last season that was 732 teams - where the only advantage being higher in the leagues give is a few byes. Beyond that, the matchups are randomly determined each round. Maximizing the _drama_ (and randomly determining which of the smaller teams gets the huge influx of cash that comes from even _playing_ against one of the biggest teams out there in that context due to their share of the television rights) while also not risking corrupting the results of the _double round robin_ in determining the best team in the country that season.)

Like, yeah, if you want to maximize the chance of a single elimination tournament producing accurate results, come up with a seeding process is a way to do that (Though how seeding should work can get... Weird... Particularly in scenes scattered five ways to the hell, to the point that often events can have on site qualification and seeding from that qualification process - NES Tetris, for example, for the CTWC, gives prospective competitors an hour to score as many maxouts points) as they can, with their highest non-maxout score - their kicker - being used to break ties. (it used to be 'highest score with second highest being used to tiebreak the couple of people who are capable of getting maxouts in qualifiers'. CTWC 2022 saw the top two seeds getting 14 maxouts, and at least one maxout being required to qualify. That scene is exploding in skill atm and was already doing before the discovery of the new rolling technique). But if you've got the time to do a round robin format anyway, and want to maximize the chance of that telling you the best team in that event? Don't stick a bloody single-elimination tournament on top of that, even if you're using the round-robin to seed it.

And this is more of a rant about traditional sports than eSports which rarely have the sort of rigorous round robin league that's giving a definitive answer to 'who's the best team' going on alongside these more chaotic single or double elimination tournaments which, as you covered last tournament structure episode, are incapable of answering that question but we have them because they're quicker than round robins or even swiss. (And don't get me started on the refusal of American sports to just let a tie be a bloody tie, instead insisting of - in some cases - infinite overtime, outside of an elimination tournament context)

[TheNeonWyvern]

Why isn't 1v5, 2v6, 3v7, 4v8 used in bracket like it is in swiss?

[TroyVan]

Sounds like single-elimination tournaments are not fun for the bottom players, because they're basically cannon fodder. What's the point of entering in tournaments with basically no chance of winning even one game?
I like rating-based matchmaking more as a semi-casual player. Imagine playing a series (a "season" perhaps) of games against closely-matched opponents, keeping a Elo or Glicko rating along the way. And when you're done, you get a rating showing how you're stacked up against the field. Much more meaningful, and players of all levels get to have fun.

[StarshadowMelody]

You're right! It doesn't seem very fair that the bottom player got seeded w/ the top! Neither does what happened prior. Round Robin FTW.

[a_guy_in_orange]

Its ok Gem, we can put the vacation picture up here on the fridge, so everyone can see it.

[RiahGreen]

YOU MADE THE SEEDING VID

Edit: I'm extremely hype for tent gaming content